Just finished watching Khaos Reigns and the only thoughts I have about it are that it is stupid and disappointing, if not straight up pointless.
They tried to fit two storylines, the Lin Kuei-Shirai Ryu fight, and Havik's nonsense, yet they managed to do good with none of them. They both both as if they were meant to be a unique story each, but got mingled together for lack of time or budget, and so both of them feel like disturbances to each other's at alternate moments.
Everything happens so fast and so randomly, and likewise it ends. Cyrax changes her mind after 1 minute, Sektor and Bi-Han go full stereotyipical liar-villains just as fast, then Havik and his goons just show up as pure interruptions.
The story keeps this obnoxious trend of excluding the main characters in favor of random alternate versions. The main story had already ditched the main cast leaving the great finale to pointless Titan alternatives with no personality beyond the cool alternate costume effect, and here it is done tenfold. Liutenant Johnny is literally pointless for the story, Tanya and Havik's timeline's plotline has gone nowhere, forgotten, reduced to atoms, who cares about the empire, Orin. whatever.
Half of the story is spent in that goddamn labyrinth, telling us backstories of characters that are forgotten and left in the dirt the moment the Mcs go back to their timeline.
Titan Havik is perhaps the greatest disappointment, he is just like Kronika, presented as a super dangerous and powerful individual, just to reveal himself a total incompetent. Literally all his minions die like flies, he does not interve ones, every single of his plans are foiled in minutes, from traps, to Orin, to never-ending clones, to Noob Saibot, to Geras etc... The citadel might be unproperly unguarded from the inside, for whatever reason, but even Geras's chamber is literally empty and just 4-5 jobbers appear only when the protagonists have had the time to fail and crack jokes.
He can apparently open portals anywhere whenever he wants, like half of the cast, but doesn't bother going to the kamidogu room himself before they steal the trinkets.
Just like Kronika, who had triumphed over billions of previous timelines, this idiot has supposedly conquered some dozens timelines (judging from the pile of Gerases) and yet he is fooled like nothing in less than a day.
He is also most uninteresting, as he keeps blabbering the same things over and over about chaos and blood and anarchy and chaos.. with his only plan being more chaos, at least MK1 new Havik had a interesting purpose in being a revolutionary, and let's not start speaking of him, who for some reason is totally absent from the story literally named after him.
Titan Havik then gets back the kamidogus because of the idiocy of Liu Kang and folks, but is literally defeated the next scene. Empowering himself with the trinkets meant nothing, heck, it might even have made him weaker, considering he loses to Noob, for some nonsensical and incongruent reason, not that the NRS folks are new to this kind of writing.
Noob is also a total clown, they present him as a menace but gets knocked out immediately and restored just as quick. The build up that loomed during the rest of the story is totally washed away in a second. During this time he also spits the same edgy nonsense we've seen him saying for three games already, every time concluding absolutely nothing.
He is then reverted to good, but he is once again an absolute pushover, requiring the aid of Scorpion and Liu Kang to take care of some more fodders. We literally see three times in a row the same scene of Scorpion and Liu scolding him for his rashness, at some point I thought I had the video in a loop or something. And for some more, reason, after proving himself the weakest and less-accomplishing character in the story, he somehow manages to defeat not only Havik with Titan powers, but also with the Kamidogus. Moments after achieving what is supposedly the greatest feat in the entirety of the story, he is hit by Geras's pause button and turned off by Liu Kang forever, great writing.
For some reason the story is littered with scenes of the characters doing absolutely nothing while the evil guys carry on their plans, from the abduction of Geras, to Havik calmly taking out the kamidogus and donning them, to him patiently ripping himself apart to create new clones. Seriously, the protagonist just stay idle waiting for them, but it is pretty much the same thing Havik does to them, sitting on the couch with his pals and watching on Maze TV the heroes smoothly pass through every obstacle.
Also, he is left dismembered and...? Why does he not regenerate? Was he banished to the void? Were the kamidogus taken from him? He is literally forgotten off screen.
Also, it feels so weird and stupid to speak of feats, when the story presented us with several giant relevant anti-feats, which were also quite important for the story. Twice they fail to knock down a measly rusty iron door. Cyrax is almost crippled by a 4-5 meters fall and Scorpion straight up says that fall would have killed him. Sektor's fatality shows her flying to space and back, and yet she now can only admittedly fly only for short distances.
Heck, I'd be more inclined to rate these people 10-A or 9-C, I known it's stupid, but the game insists in presenting them at this level.
Also, I honestly don't see how this story supports any tier 2. Havik too used the hourglass to reboot his timeline and needs the kamidogu to affect the others, once again tying into the Titans not really having any universal power without an object. He is said to be linked to the timeline, yes, but that doesn't necessarily relate to his power. Havik now fails to meet Points 2 and 4, while also leaving blank point 3, of our
Stabilization Feats requirements.
Forgive the rambling, but I had good, if not great, expectations for this story and it has disappointed me in any possible way.
